The wide-availability of wired and wireless broadband Internet connections have made it feasible to operate network services on the Internet that were formerly only hosted on high-speed local data networks (e.g., Local Area Networks). Today, network services exist that store user's digital content on server computing devices connected to the Internet and provide an interface whereby users can manage their server-stored digital content items from their personal computing devices. Such digital content items include, but are not limited to, digital documents, digital music, digital video, digital images, e-mail messages, database records, or other logical collections of digital data.
At the same time, personal computing has become more global and more mobile. The widespread adoption of portable personal computing devices such as laptops, Personal Data Assistants (PDAs), tablet computers, music players, and cell phones allow users to access to their personal server-stored digital content items virtually anywhere. A user flying on a plane to New York can access e-mail stored on a server in San Francisco. Friends in disparate geographic locations can instantly share digital photos with each other.
Unfortunately, many portable personal computing devices, especially portable wireless devices, operate in semi-connected computing environments. In semi-connected computing environments, network connectivity from the portable personal computing devices to an Internet network service may be intermittent, low-bandwidth, or high-latency. As a result, to increase availability to users' personal digital content in semi-connected environments, some Internet network services replicate server-stored digital content to the users' personal computing devices for storage at the personal computing devices thereby creating copies of the users' digital content at the personal computing devices. By doing so, users have access to their digital content items even when network connectivity is unavailable. Even when network connectivity is available, users may still prefer to access their digital content items locally as opposed to over a network for efficiency.
Creating copies of digital content at users' personal computing devices can be problematic when some but not all of the digital content belongs to the user. For example, an employee may use an Internet service paid for by his employer to store documents containing sensitive corporate information such as client presentations, spreadsheets containing company financial information, corporate legal documents, sales contracts, etc. If the employee leaves the company or is fired, the company would prefer that all corporate-owned digital content items are deleted from the former-employee's personal computing devices.
Various techniques have been developed to help digital content owners retain control over digital content stored at non-owner's personal computing devices. For example, some Internet services provide the ability to remotely “wipe” a personal computing device connected to the service. Specifically, the service sends a signal to the personal computing device to delete all locally-stored digital content items associated with the service.
However, some digital content items stored at the user's personal computing device may be owned by the user and some may be owned by another user or entity (e.g., a corporation). For example, an employee may commingle his own digital content items (e.g., personal photos, shopping lists, personal e-mails, etc.) with corporate documents. Therefore, it is desirable to provide techniques for remotely administering digital content items stored at personal computing devices in situations where some of the content items stored at the devices are owned by the users of the devices and some are owned by other users or entities.
The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.